


Running Intervention

by JoJo



Category: Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s2e12 Serpents, Gen, Old West
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-03
Updated: 2012-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-28 18:56:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/pseuds/JoJo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Getting better depends on who's around to look after you</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running Intervention

**Author's Note:**

> written for the "Addictions" prompt in my mag7bingo table
> 
> thanks to the beta posse for all your good suggestions :)

Shortly after Governor Hopewell and his entourage had rolled out of town, Chris found Josiah and Vin in the saloon.

The two of them were propping up the bar side by side. There was a certain companionability to their pose, although they weren’t talking when he came in. Chris didn’t rightly know why Josiah was there but he guessed Tanner might feel the need for whiskey. It had been a sweet shot to take down Stutts—perfectly timed, perfectly placed—but damn, if it hadn’t…

When he bellied up at his side, Vin let him lean in the shared silence for a spell.

“All patched up?” Tanner asked at length. Whatever else he was mulling over, it was no surprise to Chris these were his first words.

At Vin’s other side, elbow sliding on the bar, Josiah fished blindly for his shot glass.

Chris’s medical update on Ezra was to the point. “On his damn feet still talking bullshit about the money.”

Thinking on it, Chris had lost a chunk of his good humor somewhere between the foot of the livery steps and the saloon, but an imprint must have remained because he heard Tanner give a faint “heh”.

Larabee grimaced, nodding his head at the barkeep for a shot. “Half the wad of cash he was wearing’s covered in blood. Ain’t no use to nobody.”

“Blood money,” Josiah muttered thickly, head waving as he shifted around to face them. Chris glanced down the bar at him, realized he was well ahead of them—in more ways than one.

“Woulda taken that bullet point blank through the heart.” Vin rubbed at his chest, winced slightly. “He saved Mary’s life, the money saved his. Now he’s on his feet I don’t see as we have a problem.”

Josiah jostled him as he changed position. “We have plenty of problems,” he slurred. “Plenty.” His head wagged again as he brought the shot glass to his lips, which made Chris frown, fearing it wouldn’t make the target. “When the good Lord looks into our hearts, He can see we’re all as sick as dogs.”

Chris raised his brows at Vin who didn’t make much of a face in return—just the smallest purse of his lips.

“Keep goin’ inside that bottle, preacher, you can count on it.”

Josiah nodded gravely. The nod continued, forcing him to replace the shot glass on the bar, slopping whiskey. Undeterred he reached for the neck of the half-empty bottle, dragged it towards him across the shiny wood.

“What do you want more of?” he asked nobody in particular. “What can’t you get enough of? What makes you sick when you can’t get it and sicker still when you can?” It sounded like the beginning of a sermon, only Josiah’s usual well-placed inflections were missing.

Deciding he knew whose problem Josiah meant, Chris offered a gruff response.

“Maybe he learned somethin’” He’d often doubted that would ever happen but now he thought about it—and even about Ezra’s shit-eatin’ grin outside Nathan’s—he was pretty sure they were getting somewhere.

“Maybe we all did.” Vin was tentative, if not a tad down-in-the-mouth. “I was sick for that gun, sick to the guts I didn’t have it. That what you’re talkin’ about, Josiah?“

“Falling headlong…” Josiah swallowed a shot, banged down the glass so hard it developed a crack. “Into temptation.” It wasn’t clear to Chris if that referred to Vin or Ezra, or even to the preacher himself. Shakily Josiah lifted a hand to wipe it over his face but didn’t seem to have the energy to complete the operation. “Some men fall, they repent, they fall again.” He smacked his lips. “Danger, power, liquor, laudanum, blood, money, sex.” He screwed up his face at either the taste of the liquor or the depths of Man’s downfall. “We’re all sick as dogs.”

Chris was losing patience with the whole notion. Josiah seemed to be widening the scope of his theory by the second. “Buck’s thinkin’ of gettin’ married,” he muttered. “So maybe he ain’t sick no more.”

“Men can change,” Josiah conceded eventually, finger rising. “They can grow.” He made an uncertain gesture with the whole hand, then let it slump back on the bar. “They can… recover, with help.”

Chris thought about Nathan for a second, but he wasn’t sure that was exactly what Josiah had in mind. He filled his glass, then Vin’s, fingered the cracked one towards Josiah.

At their backs the batwings slapped open and then shut. Chris and Vin glanced into the mirror in front. None of them turned. They heard slow footsteps drag across the saloon, and then Buck pressed in next to Chris with a long sigh.

“Boys,” he said, after looking along the bar, “are we celebratin’?”

Chris shrugged. “Dunno, Buck. Are we?”

Buck’s fingers drummed for a while. “Well Mary didn’t get herself shot. And Ezra didn’t get himself killed.” His shoulders heaved in another sigh. “And I ain’t gettin’ married quite yet.”

Chris guessed it would be real easy to say the wrong thing at this point and that maybe he should just keep quiet, but the whiskey and the pleasantly rambling cross purposes of the conversation in the saloon thus far had loosened his tongue.

“So you ain’t been cured yet?”

“Huh?”

Vin grinned. “Josiah here’s been ponderin’ on things we want that maybe ain’t no good for us.”

Buck accepted the full shot glass that had been put in front of him. He picked it up, glanced sideways at the three of them.

“Like women?”

“Sex…” Josiah said indistinctly. He took a breath as if he was about to recite the whole sorry list again but Vin nudged him quiet.

Buck frowned in mystification and then shrugged. He drank down his shot, and then held out the glass for a re-fill. Chris obliged, suddenly feeling his good humor creeping back up on him.

Hell, maybe Josiah had a point. Seemed like there was a whole lot wrong with all of them, one way and another. But then again, they were all still here so maybe there was a whole lot right too. They might well be as sick as dogs, but any one of them could count on finding the help they needed.

Knowing Vin and Buck would catch on at once and that Josiah would remember in the morning, he decided to take a shot at redemption for them all and raised his glass.

“To gettin’ better,” he said, and smiled as the whiskey hit his stomach.

 

-ends-


End file.
